its overthrow.
As machines take over routine tasks and the accelerative thrust increases the amount of novelty in the environment, more and more of the energy of society (and its organizations) must turn toward the solution of non- routine problems. This requires a degree of imagination and creativity that bureaucracy, with its man-in-a-slot organization, its permanent structures, and its hierarchies, is not well equipped to provide. Thus it is not surprising to find that wherever organizations today are caught up in the stream of technological or social change, wherever research and development is important, wherever men must cope with first-time problems, the decline of bureaucratic forms is most pronounced. In these frontier organizations a new system of human relations is springing up.
To live, organizations must cast off those bureaucratic practices that immobilize them, making them less sensitive and less rapidly responsive to change. The result, according to Joseph A. Raffaele, Professor of Economics at Drexel Institute of Technology, is that we are moving toward a 'working society of technical co-equals' in which the 'line of demarcation between the leader and the led has become fuzzy.' Super-industrial Man, rather than occupying a permanent, cleanly-defined slot and performing mindless routine tasks in response to orders from above, finds increasingly that he must assume decision-making responsibility – and must do so within a kaleidoscopically changing organization structure built upon highly transient human relationships. Whatever else might be said, this is not the old, familiar Weberian bureaucracy at which so many of our novelists and social critics are still, belatedly, hurling their rusty javelins.
If it was Max Weber who first defined bureaucracy and predicted its triumph, Warren Bennis may go down in sociological textbooks as the man who first convincingly predicted its demise and sketched the outlines of the organizations that are springing up to replace it. At precisely the moment when the outcry against bureaucracy was reaching its peak of shrillness on American campuses and elsewhere, Bennis, a social psychologist and professor of industrial management, predicted flatly that 'in the next twenty-five to fifty years' we will all 'participate in the end of bureaucracy.' He urged us to begin looking 'beyond bureaucracy.'
Thus Bennis argues that 'while various proponents of 'good human relations' have been fighting bureaucracy on humanistic grounds and for Christian values, bureaucracy seems most likely to founder on its inability to adapt to rapid change ...
'Bureaucracy,' he says, 'thrives in a highly competitive undifferentiated and stable environment, such as the climate of its youth, the Industrial Revolution. A pyramidal structure of authority, with power concentrated in the hands of a few ... was, and is, an eminently suitable social arrangement for routinized tasks. However, the environment has changed in just those ways which make the mechanism most problematic. Stability has vanished.'
Each age produces a form of organization appropriate to its own tempo. During the long epoch of agricultural civilization, societies were marked by low transience. Delays in communication and transportation slowed the rate at which information moved. The pace of individual life was comparatively slow. And organizations were seldom called upon to make what we would regard as high-speed decisions.
The age of industrialism brought a quickened tempo to both individual and organizational life. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that bureaucratic forms were needed. For all that they seem lumbering and inefficient to us, they were, on the average, capable of making better decisions faster than the loose and ramshackle organizations that preceded them. With all the rules codified, with a set of fixed principles indicating how to deal with various work problems, the flow of decisions could be accelerated to keep up with the faster pace of life brought by industrialism.
Weber was keen enough to notice this, and he pointed out that 'The extraordinary increase in the speed by which public announcements, as well as economic and political facts are transmitted exerts a steady and sharp pressure in the direction of speeding up the tempo of administrative reaction ...' He was mistaken, however, when he said 'The optimum of such reaction time is normally attained only by a strictly bureaucratic organization.' For it is now clear that the acceleration of change has reached so rapid a pace that even bureaucracy can no longer keep up. Information surges through society so rapidly, drastic changes in technology come so quickly that newer, even more instantly responsive forms of organization must characterize the future.
What, then, will be the characteristics of the organizations of super-industrial society? 'The key word,' says Bennis, 'will be 'temporary'; there will be adaptive, rapidly changing temporary systems.' Problems will be solved by task forces composed of 'relative strangers who represent a set of diverse professional skills.'
Executives and managers in this system will function as coordinators between the various transient work teams. They will be skilled in understanding the jargon of different groups of specialists, and they will communicate across groups, translating and interpreting the language of one into the language of another. People in this system will, according to Bennis, 'be differentiated not vertically, according to rank and role, but flexibly and functionally, according to skill and professional training.'
Because of the high rate of movement back and forth from one transient team to another, he continues, 'There will ... be a reduced commitment to work groups ... While skills in human interaction will become more important, due to the growing needs for collaboration in complex tasks, there will be a concomitant reduction in group cohesiveness ... People will have to learn to develop quick and intense relationships on the job, and learn to bear the loss of more enduring work relationships.'
This then is a picture of the coming Ad-hocracy, the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals. From this sketch, moreover, it is possible to deduce some of the characteristics of the human beings who will populate these new organizations – and who, to some extent, are already to be found in the prototype organizations of today. What emerges is dramatically different from the stereotype of the organization man. For just as the acceleration of change and increased novelty in the environment demand a new form of organization, they demand, too, a new kind of man.
Three of the outstanding characteristics of bureaucracy were, as we have seen, permanence, hierarchy, and a division of labor. These characteristics molded the human beings who manned the organizations. Permanence – the recognition that the link between man and organization would endure through time – brought with it a commitment to the organization. The longer the man stayed within its embrace, the more he saw his past as an investment in the organization, the more he saw his personal future as dependent upon that of the organization. Longevity bred loyalty. In work organizations, this natural tendency was powerfully reinforced by the knowledge that termination of one's links with the organization very often meant a loss of the means of economic survival. In a world wracked by scarcity for the many, a job was precious. The bureaucrat was thus immobile and deeply oriented toward economic security. To keep his job, he willingly subordinated his own interests and convictions to those of the organization.
Power-laden hierarchies, through which authority flowed, wielded the whip by which the individual was held in line. Knowing that his relationship with the organization would be relatively permanent (or at least hoping that it would be) the organization man looked within for approval. Rewards and punishments came down the hierarchy to the individual, so that the individual, habitually looking upward at the next rung of the hierarchical ladder, became conditioned to subservience. Thus: the wishy-washy organization man – the man without personal convictions (or without the courage to make them evident). It paid to conform.
Finally, the organization man needed to understand his place in the scheme of things; he occupied a well-defined niche, performed actions that were also well-defined by the rules of the organization, and he was judged by the precision with which he followed the book. Faced by relatively routine problems, he was encouraged to seek routine answers. Unorthodoxy, creativity, venturesomeness were discouraged, for they interfered with the predictability required by the organization of its component parts.
The embryonic Ad-hocracies of today demand a radically different constellation of human characteristics. In place of permanence, we find transience – high mobility between organizations, never-ending reorganizations within them, and a constant generation and decay of temporary work groupings. Not surprisingly, we witness a decline in old-fashioned 'loyalty' to the organization and its sub-structures.
Writing about young executives in American industry today, Walter Guzzardi, Jr., declares: 'The agreements between modern man and modern organization are not like the laws of the Medes and the Persians. They were not made to stand forever ... The man periodically examines his own attitude toward the organization, and gauges its attitude toward him. If he doesn't like what he sees, he tries to change it. If he can't change it, he moves.' Says executive recruiter George Peck: 'The number of top executives with their resumes in their desk
